Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Rhee Donghoon’s solo exhibitions include 《Room with Flowers》 (DrawingRoom, Seoul, 2019), 《The Statue Knows How to Dance》 (Gallery SP, Seoul, 2021), 《Woman》 (VSF&milk, Los Angeles, USA, 2022), and 《Light Choreography》 (Gallery SP, Seoul, 2023).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

He has participated in numerous group exhibitions such as 《UNBOXING PROJECT 3.2: Maquette》 (VSF, Los Angeles, USA, 2024), 《grid 3》 (Biscuit Gallery, Tokyo, 2024), the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale (Changwon, 2023), 《Sculptural Impulse》 (SeMA Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《NEW RISING ARTIST》 (Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeju, 2022), and 《Object Universe》 (Ulsan Art Museum, Ulsan, 2022). He will also participate in the upcoming group exhibition 《Crush Zone》 at Gallery SP on May 8, 2025.

Collections (Selected)

His works are housed in MMCA Art Bank, Ulsan Art Museum, and Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art.

Originality & Identity

Rhee Donghoon begins his practice with a heightened sensitivity to the vitality of everyday subjects, translating them into the language of visual art. In his early phase (2015–2016), he experimented with converting literary narratives into flat paintings. This inquiry gradually evolved into an interest in the canvas as a material support, eventually expanding the scope of painting into the realm of sculpture. Based on a cyclical process of observation → sculpture → painting, Rhee has explored the subtle relationships between two- and three-dimensional media.

His work goes beyond mere representation of form to fix the residue of time and movement into material structures, seeking a new sculptural grammar. Notably, works such as Black Mamba (2021), Not Shy (2021), and Hot Sauce 1 (2021), presented in his solo exhibition 《The Statue Knows How to Dance》(2021, Gallery SP), embody this approach. These works capture a sequence of gestures from K-pop choreography and translate them into sculptural form, embedding temporality into the static body of the object.

Style & Contents

Rhee’s formal strategies involve a deep engagement with materials such as wood, paper, and acrylic, which he uses to open up a dialogue between sculpture and painting. In the 'Flower Vase' (2018) and 'Flower Pot' (2018–) series, he sculpts objects frequently found in still-life paintings and reinterprets them as flat images, thereby enacting a dual circulation between sculpture and painting. Working quickly with the grain and texture of wood, he creates voluminous forms, then applies color in a way that evokes painterly illusions, generating a dynamic interplay between physical and visual sensation.

In his 2023 solo exhibition 《Light Choreography》(Gallery SP), Rhee shifted from wood to paper as his primary material to more vividly visualize the rhythms and gestures of dance. Works such as New Jeans (2023) and Compilation 1 (2023) exploit the flexible, foldable, and tearable properties of paper to capture fleeting choreographic moments.

These pieces blur the boundaries between the flat and the dimensional, constructing a new sculptural language in which fragmentation, assembly, and movement take precedence over fixed form. His recent works thus increasingly explore the ambiguous terrain between materiality and temporality, representation and abstraction.

Topography & Continuity

Starting from painting, Rhee has extended the logic of painting into sculpture, developing a unique formal language at the intersection of flatness and volume. The juxtaposition of sculpture and painting in 《Room with Flowers》(2019, DrawingRoom) marked the beginning of this inquiry, which expanded in subsequent exhibitions such as 《The Statue Knows How to Dance》(2021) and 《Light Choreography》(2023). These later exhibitions incorporated elements such as paper, photography, and video, forming multi-layered structures that reflect digital-era sensibilities. His sculptural forms have also transitioned into more modular and assembled configurations, signaling a shift toward flexibility and fluidity.

Rhee is now recognized for redefining the practice of sculpture by converting questions of representation, materiality, perspective, and narrative into physical structures. While dismantling traditional sculptural hierarchies and media boundaries, his work remains grounded in material intuition and a painterly gaze. Looking forward, he is expected to continue evolving sculpture as an expanded sensory apparatus—one that forges connections between visual perception and spatial reasoning in an image-saturated, digital global context.